Ambiguity and the origins of syntax
© 2015, De Gruyter Mouton. All rights reserved. The paper argues that syntax is motivated by the need to avoid combinatorial search in parsing and semantic ambiguity in interpretation. It reports on a case study for the emergence and sharing of first-order phrase structures in a population of agents...
| Autores: | , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2015 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) |
| Repositorio: | DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:digital.csic.es:10261/123285 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/123285 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Origins of syntax Language games Semiotic dynamics Language strategies |
| Resumo: | © 2015, De Gruyter Mouton. All rights reserved. The paper argues that syntax is motivated by the need to avoid combinatorial search in parsing and semantic ambiguity in interpretation. It reports on a case study for the emergence and sharing of first-order phrase structures in a population of agents playing language games. First-order phrase structures combine words into phrases but do not yet generalise to hierarchical or recursive phrases. To study why human languages exhibit phrase structure, a series of strategies for creating and sharing linguistic conventions are examined, starting from a lexical strategy without syntax and then studying the use of groups, n-grams and patterns. Each time we show in which way a strategy improves on the computational complexity of the previous on. |
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